Apricot-Cherry Upside-down Cake
July 3, 2011 § Leave a comment
The other day I was sitting on our rooftop balcony, overlooking the grassy area between the houses on our block, wearing Ray-Bans, book in hand, wanting for a friend to arrive. This cake was sitting on a heavy wood cutting board on the table and places were set for two people. The plates may have been a bit chipped, but this cake came out of the pan perfectly intact; so perfectly in fact, that I still like looking at the pictures of it in awe at how pretty it was.
Upside-down cakes make me really nervous. Actually, cakes made me nervous in general. I always, always manage to skip a step in the recipe and never wait long enough for them to cool and end up with a cake that needs significant patching up. Add to that the stress of having to flip something upside down, and I’m left with that brief but sickening moment wondering if I’m going to end up with a picture perfect slab of cake or a gooey, broken lump of cake and cooked fruit. But that queasiness was gone in a flash when this cake overturned beautifully.
We ate some for lunch that day, some for breakfast the next day, some with a glass of Slivovitz the next night. Basically everyone I know if this city ate some of this cake, which is a very good thing because there was quite a bit of it. The other point of triumph is that I finally found some produce that was more than just edible here. In the states, I would never pick up a basket of cherries at a corner store, from a table right next to the liquor shelves. But I will say that the apricots I purchased here were the first fresh apricots I have ever enjoyed eating in my entire life.
How’s that for eating in the Czech Republic?
Apricot-Cherry Upside Down Cake
Adapted from David Lebovitz
Makes one 13 x 10 inch slab cake
For the fruit layer:
6 tablespoons butter (90g)
1 1/2 cups packed (270g) brown sugar
About 20 apricots, quartered
2 cups of cherries, halved and pitted
For the cake layer:
8 tablespoons (115g) unsalted butter
3/4 cup (150g) sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups (210g) flour
1 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup (125ml) plain yogurt
In a saucepan, melt the 6 tablespoons of butter. Add the brown sugar and stir constantly until the sugar is melted and begins to bubble. Remove from heat and pour into the baking dish. When the caramel mixture is cooled, top with rows of cut fruit. Set aside.
Preheat the oven to 350F (190C).
Cream the 8 tablespoons of butter and sugar until fluffly. Add the vanilla, then the eggs, and beat until smooth.
Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Fold in half of the flour mixture, then the yogurt, then the remaining dry ingredients. Mix until the flour is just incorporated.
Spread the batter over the fruit layer and bake for about 40 minutes. The center of the cake will be set and the fruit may bubble around the edges when it is done. Remove the cake from the oven, let cool for about 20 minutes and flip the cake out onto the plate.
Dried-plum walnut frangipane tart
June 24, 2011 § Leave a comment
I think the rain follows me. It catches me at the most inopportune moments. Like now when I went out to a café to write in a sundress and then the downpour started. The café is connected to one of the English speaking bookstores for all the expats who still want a taste of home; I don’t mind, I like real espresso instead of instant coffee and the red velvet lounge chairs are comfy enough to wait out the storm. Yesterday the dark clouds came in as fireworks spontaneously rose up over the river. There was never really any explanation of what we were celebrating, which I am learning seems to be the norm here. But we ran to the living room window anyway, which overlooks the town to the west, and watched the lights rise and fall in the distance. I could get used to that.
What is harder to get used to is the food here — displays of dense, heavy dumplings and strange animal body parts (have you ever eaten a pig’s knee before?). The closest I have gotten to eating well here is getting an Italian guy to offer to make dinner for me. Which I don’t think really counts as eating well in the Czech Republic. I am also not going to get used to the produce selection in the supermarket nearest me — vegetable choices range from tomatoes to lettuce to bell peppers…and, that’s about it. In order to survive, I am making huge batches of cashew-berry-papaya granola and eating it with yogurt at all times of the day. The yogurt here is rich and creamy enough to never even think of added sugar. And there is just enough space in my new kitchen to want to spend some time in it.
The church bells are usually ringing as I come back from my run. The butter cuts easily into the flour for savory piecrust. The water boils on the counter. The tea is creamy, because I still haven’t found skim milk. The light streams in through the window, the trees in the backyard garden below are damp with last night’s rain. As I step out the door and onto the metro, I remember to smile and nod when people talk to me. Act like you understand what they’re saying, and no one will ever know the difference. The best part is running down the street and not knowing what the guys are saying to you. It’s like living in a bubble, where you can make up the reality around you.
In the center of town, other languages fly in every direction. The Charles Bridge teems with visitors and reminds me of the Rialto Bridge in Venice. I get frustrated winding through the crowd with the cameras flashing, before realizing, wait, I actually know where I am going! I haven’t taken out a map since my second day here, it seems impossible to get lost. Meanwhile, the winding side streets, with old wooden doors and graffiti decorations, are captivating. The cobblestones are rough on the feet but I know the streets would look barren without them. Small groups of musicians wait around the corner, laze by the river, strumming guitars and blowing into long horns. A climb in a park means looking out at the rowers and sailors on the river as they disappear off into the horizon.
If other cities I have been to have been detailed and ornate, here, walls looks like they were made by hand. The rusticity makes the streets all the more beautiful. That might be one of the main reasons why I love my kitchen here. I feel perfectly in place rolling out a rustic dough on the wooden table, filling it with ground nuts and butter and plopping a few dried plums right in the middle.
The recipe for this tart, fittingly, comes from the book Cooking by Hand by Paul Bertolli.
Ahoj Praha
June 19, 2011 § Leave a comment
I’m sitting on the balcony patio of our apartment in Prague, on the top floor of an old yellow building surrounded by tiled red rooftops. It’s not quite six in the morning but I’m wide awake and finally, for the first time since arriving here a couple of days ago, processing actually being here. I have been awake for every sunrise and sunset since my arrival. I have climbed the 287 stairs to the top of the Gothic St. Vitus Cathedral at the Prague Castle on two hours of sleep the night before. I have watched the Canucks lose the series with the expats and sat in a smoky hookah bar with the locals, where you pay however much you feel like paying on the way out. I’ve tried zero of the Czech specialties, though have had some of the best frites of my life. I’ve discovered the hard way that beer is really cheaper than water here. We’ve eaten Hungarian poppyseed cake, made by a Couchsurfing visitor, and made pizza instead of ordering from down the street, and I’ve brought over caramelized onion quiche for the morning after. Not bad for a couple of twenty-somethings in a new city.
I love looking out the window at the colorful, lacey rooftops, interrupted every so often with two rising cathedral towers. The rooftops remind me of the brightly colored Victorians back home. The wind rattles the open windows, just like the storms at home. The clouds that part briefly to give way to the sun, only to come sweeping back in a couple of minutes later. Unlike in Paris, I am acutely aware of being in a foreign country, as all I can manage to do in an everyday exchange with the grocer is smile in response to her talking. But without the romantics and the hype, and if you’re excluding that time I got caught in a torrential downpour in four inch heels walking to the closed metro station, it’s a very homey place. I feel like I have been here forever already.
If I believed in love at first sight, Prague might be it.
Alfajores
May 28, 2011 § 1 Comment
A pot of English Breakfast tea steeps on the countertop, covered in a dull flowered tea cozy. I’m always amazed at how warm the tea cozy keeps the tea, as I’m curled up on the leather sofa, under a hand-crocheted blanket. The blanket is a dusty purple, interspersed with green and white squares, and they seem to me like flowers in a field of lavender. I’ve opened the linen curtains to let the light come in and am watching raindrops fall on the canoe outside. They hit with a little, echoing patter and slip to the ground, covering the grass with a sheet of frosty water. It’s chilly here near the ocean, the wind brings in large gusts of frozen air, that swell the lungs. You can smell the briny seaweed dying on the stone beach, turn over minuscule, red crabs amongst the rocks in your bare hands, and trace the smooth, water-worn edges of driftwood washed up on shore.
I’m flipping through my grandmother’s recipe box, pulling out yellowed newspaper cutouts and handwritten notes on scraps of paper. I’m milling through recipes that are as familiar as many in my own recipe collection, and others that I have never seen her make (Cherry Delight?). I pass over the first fruit pie I had ever tasted, back when I still believed cooked fruit was “ew, gross,” which is written on the card as a rhubarb pie, but was often made with the raspberries and blackberries picked in the backyard. In August, I would clamber through the screen door at the back of the house, hands full of containers filled to the brim with berries, fingers stained with juices of berries that I had…um, already eaten. As a child, I was known for putting a raspberry on each of my fingers and gently plucking them off one by one with my mouth. I say that it’s a testament to how many raspberries I ate before I was ten, that they are now my least favorite berries.
Since those days, my grandparents have moved up-island to a small town called Comox, in the valley at the base of Mount Washington. The blackberry bramble has been traded in for the rugged coastline and proximity to the ski hill. But all the jams are still made in house, the blueberries picked right down the street and the rhubarb from the newly planted backyard. There are still jars of summer peaches canned at the peak of the summer heat, and cherries that burst with syrup when you bite into them. I don’t remember ever helping much with the canning; I think I was bored by the monotony of it, the hours spent standing over the stovetop, the constant stirring and the repetition of chopping stone fruits. I much preferred playing the hunter-gatherer in the gardens, crawling under the thorny blackberry bushes, stretching off the ladder to reach the top branch of the plum tree where all the best-looking fruit was (disappointingly, I would often grasp the plum, only to discover it half eaten by birds on the unseen side) and playing with the neighbors’ cat Smokey.
But recently I’ve quite enjoyed standing over the stove, peering over the bubbling pot, stirring to keep the thickening liquid from boiling up and over the rim. It requires getting hot and sticky and staying alert, but I took great pleasure in the thickening of my cream and sugar mixture, watching it slowly melt to a deep amber, and then spooning my dulce de leche into a small glass jar at the end. While certainly not what usually comes off of my grandmother’s stovetop, it was smooth and melding-to-the-tongue sweet. It played well off of a crumbly, barely-sweet shortbread. Despite the flakiness of the cookies and the tendency of sandwich cookies to quickly become a fragmented mess, they held up well on the way up North. As the tiny twenty-person plane shook with turbulence in the coastal winds and the over-worked engine roared next to my window, I felt like there still might exist a frontier left to be discovered in this world.
You can find the recipe for dulce de leche here and the recipe for the cookies here.
Save Me, San Francisco
May 17, 2011 § Leave a comment
Word is that it snowed at Tahoe this Sunday. Maybe so. But it sure rained in the city. We hit the finish line at Bay to Breakers — I was dressed as a bumblebee and hooked into a centipede with twelve other runners — and the sprinkles started. Sprinkles turned into downpour the next day and now the sidewalks are sheathed in water in the middle of May. A predictable “only in San Francisco” ending to a quintessentially San Francisco weekend.
We started it off with a pizza tasting at Coffee Bar. Four street pizza crews — Pizza Politana, Fist of Flour, Copper Top Ovens and Casey’s Pizza — descended on the light, airy, working café on an unexpected corner of the Mission-Potrero Hill merge to engage each other in a street-side, pizza throw down for charity. Twelve dollars got you four slices of pizza and a glass of wine or beer. We warmed up by the barbeque-housing-pizza-stone ovens at Casey’s Pizza while waiting for our margarita and lusting over their white spring onion pie. Another favorite was the Xtra-Xtra pie from Pizza Politana with chilies and spicy olives.
The eating continued the next day, this time with me on the other side of the table. The food blogging world came together for a spectacular bake sale Saturday morning, complete with gold-sparkled chocolate hazelnut macarons, red velvet cupcakes, vanilla bean salted caramels, tri-colored mochi, various vegan and gluten-free quick breads and pear-almond tarts. I made Italian plum-walnut frangipane tarts and black and white checkerboard cookies (more on these later), packaged with colorful, curled ribbons. And then I sat behind the table for an hour so, coaxing 5-year-olds out of snatching up the chocolate chip cookies without doing a complete tour of the room first.
And then it was off to the New Taste Marketplace, where many up-and-coming food entrepreneurs in the city showcase their creations. I finally met Kai of NoshThis, the genius behind bacon crack. Don’t know what that is? Crunchy, pralined bacon bits covered in dark chocolate. Look him up, consider yourself warned. He was also selling salt and black pepper caramels and Irish coffee on a stick, which I was convinced into adding to my bag. I also bombarded the girls at A Humble Plate, who were making Lao sausage sliders. I’m not normally a sausage fan and I recently went back to being vegetarian so I couldn’t order any but my memories of Lao sausage as not likely to be wiped from my mind anytime soon, so I enthusiastically forced a slider on our obliging weekend guest.
Sunday evening saw us at a wine tasting benefit for the Italian Institute. Hidden on a small alleyway at the foot of North Beach, the Institute holds daytime and nighttime Italian classes of all levels. I ran into my Italian teacher at the door, sampled several white wines and ate plenty of tuna tartare toasts before we snagged a quick dinner at the bar at Bix next door.
And more on a random note but also things that made me very happy this weekend. I succumbed to Dorie Greenspan’s Paris Sweets at a local bookstore this weekend so there will be lots of pastries in the future. And the weekend was that much sweeter with the discovery Saturday evening that local corn on the cob is finally in season.
Snickerdoodles
May 9, 2011 § 1 Comment
I’m getting really antsy. Literally all I can do is sit online all day looking at airline websites, searching for train tickets, comparing prices, signing up for Couchsurfing, sending off my WWOOFing requests. I cannot seem to think about anything else. Meanwhile, it seems to be becoming summer around here. The sun is out almost every day, but the wind has come in too in huge, gusty doses. Runs are now done directly into a firm and constant headwind. Hence less time outside, and more time umm…planning my life two months from now? No one said life was easy.
But then something happened that made me glad to be in San Francisco this time of year. After the discovery that I am most likely allergic to apples and the requisite purging of many of my favorite desserts from the repertoire, I’ve been getting pretty down on the lack of produce options at this time of year. I mean, you could have an apple or a navel orange or maybe a mandarin. I hate nothing more than having a lack of choices. But then, then I went to the Noe Valley farmers market on Saturday and right there in front of me were the season’s first crates of local cherries. Overflowing crates, leaking juices to permanently stain my fingers, and I grabbed handful after handful. As it is, my paper bag full didn’t even last through the weekend. But between you and me, I am going to blame that on the little brother, who likes to decide that he likes things after you buy them and consequently eats his way through your entire stash that you thought was for yourself and yourself only.
Another thing he is good at eating his way through is entire batches of cookies. A couple hastily stolen from the cookie racks with a very guilty look on his face, half a dozen in his school lunch. Come to think of it, I’m kind of the same way with cookies. They go fast.
Sugar cookies tend to get the short end of the stick. On a cookie plate with others offering up chocolately, nutty, fruity goodness, there aren’t many people who won’t pass them up for something more extravagant. But no other cookie quite achieves that soft, chewy interior and crisp edges quite like the ordinary sugar cookie. And coated with cinnamon sugar — seriously who doesn’t love cinnamon toast — and given a cute name like “snickerdoodle,” there’s really no way you can pass them up again.
Snickerdoodle Cookies
From Stars Desserts by Emily Luchetti
1 stick unsalted butter
3/4 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar
1 egg
1 1/3 cups flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
Pinch salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
In a large mixing bowl, cream together the butter and the 3/4 cup sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and mix until smooth. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, baking soda and salt. Fold the dry mixture into the wet mixture. In a small bowl, mix together the remaining 1 1/2 tablespoons sugar and the cinnamon. Roll the dough into 1-inch balls and roll in the cinnamon-sugar mixture. Place the cookie balls on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake the cookies for 8 to 10 minutes or until the edges are golden brown.
Whole Lemon Tart
May 5, 2011 § Leave a comment
Between cancelled flights, an onslaught of interviews for a new article, finishing up at work last week and houseparties this past week, the downtime conducive to actually putting a coherent sentence together has been pretty much non-existent. While I haven’t been writing, I have had mouth surgery, made a trip to the emergency room with excruciating chest pain related to an antibiotic I have been taking, barely recovered from that and jet-setted across the country. But I am now back home with very little to discuss that does not have to do with beer — be it the drinking it, the after effects of it, or the new article I’m writing that is all about beer. That said, I left campus again feeling like I finally had a clean slate to start next year on, summer funding secured, a new major that I am actually excited about, and a lineup of junior paper topics that I can’t wait to start thinking about (someone studying for finals right now, feel free to punch me in the face here).
It’s disconcerting going back to campus. The lawns are still pristine, the grass cut, the walk to the Street still feels like second nature. It’s like it has stopped in time. Sure, someone may have a new boyfriend and someone else may be about to graduate, but otherwise not much has changed. It brings a new definition to the “Orange Bubble.” I took a trip in New York City one evening to meet a friend I had met in Paris of all places. As I stepped out off the escalator of Penn Station and the world screamed and pushed around me, I was reminded of how much comfort I found on my trips to the city during school (though they were not many), because the city actually feels like life. It makes even a city girl, born and raised, feel like she just left the farm for the first time.
But today is not for beer drinking, rather it is for margarita drinking and taco eating and and and it’s Cinco de Mayo!!! Okay, so this isn’t actually a margarita and it’s actually lemon, though I’m sure it would work with lime as well, but it still fits the theme because — and really listen to this — all you have to do is throw a lemon in the blender with some sugar and there you have a tart. Genius.
Whole Lemon Tart
This is a bit different than your standard lemon tart as it actually tastes like the whole lemon, rind and all. It’s a bit scary to throw the whites of the rind into a tart filling and I admit I wasn’t completely sold on first bite, but once the tart cooled and chilled, I really changed my opinion on it. I’m not sure I’m willing to leave my dearest lemon curd behind, but make this version at least once as a novelty.
1 average-sized lemon (about 4 1/2 ounces; 130 grams), rinsed and dried
1 1/2 cups (300 grams) sugar
1 large egg
1 large egg yolk
1 1/2 tablespoons (12 grams) cornstarch
1 stick (4 ounces; 115 grams) unsalted butter, melted and cooled
1 9-inch tart shell (or use your favorite rectangular tart pan) made with Smitten Kitchen’s Sweet Tart Dough, partially baked and cooled
Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.
Slice whole lemon in half and pull out seeds from it and the half. Then cut lemons into small pieces.
Throw lemons and sugar in blender or processor and pulse, blend and scrape down sides until you have smooth consistency. Add the eggs, egg yolk, butter and cornstarch, and pulse and blend until filling is thoroughly mixed. Pour the filling into partially baked crust.
Carefully transfer baking sheet to oven. Bake for 20 minutes, then increase oven temperature to 350 degrees F and bake tart for an additional 25 to 30 minutes. Don’t be alarmed when filling starts to bubble up. Tart is baked when the filling is set, but still shaky in the center and top has a sugary crust. Don’t worry if it bubbles some, mine overflowed and the fire alarm went off.
Transfer tart pan to cooling rack and let cool to room temperature. Serve with a dusting of confectioners’ sugar.
Oatcakes and the big 26.2
April 19, 2011 § 2 Comments
I sat down to do a race recap of my first marathon this weekend, and I can already barely remember parts. There was never a point in time where I didn’t think that I would finish it but there were many points when it just needed to be over damn it, and why did that last mile feel so, so long. Miles one through five were faster, faster than they should have been, and I was alive and peppy and trying to get away from the people that were chit-chatting behind me. And then we hit the long, straightaway along the marshes of the bay and the pace relaxed enough to take in the cow pastures. I ran past horses, along a muddled creek, a dirt gravel path framed by dried out weeds. The runners had separated out and I was on my own now, very on my own for miles at a time without a soul in sight. The out portion seemed to go on forever, one never-ending trail without an end in sight. Eight miles down, hit the 12-mile marker, turned around soon after. Did the whole trail back again. Boredom set in as I passed mile 15. I picked up the little brother on his bike around there. My whole family had been biking around the course, handing me energy gummies and water. They stayed pretty nearby for the rest of the race. Mile 19, the pain really sets in. Suddenly the slight uphill as you duck under the overpass feels like a real hill. I don’t really feel like I need to say that my legs hurt, but nothing really hurt, so I guess that’s a good thing. Another out-and-back for miles 21-24. I never really noticed a wall. I noticed I was tired yes, my legs felt tight and heavy; I knew if I stopped running, I wouldn’t be able to start again. Before mile 25, the out-and-back was over and we turned in to run the lake on the way home. Mile 25, the home stretch, you could see the finish line balloons, the tents, it all looked so far away. But you could see it. I’m not sure if that was better or worse. The last mile seemed to continue for longer than a final mile should — every time I thought I was nearly done, the path wound again to the side and then there emerged a whole other portion of the pond I hadn’t been able to see a few seconds before. And then one more turn. And then it was over. And I was sitting on the grass, eating a lackluster It’s It ice cream sandwich (why are these famous again?) and then a handful of peanut M&Ms and a Safeway white chocolate chunk cookie.
I had originally been planning on making a post-race snack the night before. But between making a 3.5-hour playlist (which I didn’t even get to finish in the race!) and cutting bite sized Power Bars, I never got around to it. So instead, the next morning, I hobbled around the house and made these hearty oatcakes. I pre-ordered Heidi Swanson’s new book Super Natural Every Day and it was like Christmas when it finally arrived. Every page is gorgeous and I want to stand in the middle of the kitchen hugging it and cooking from it all day. She calls these oatcakes an improved version of the oatcakes — little oat patties, often with dried apricots or nuts — that you find (and are consequently disappointed by) in many San Francisco coffee shops. These are the ideal version, dense, slightly moist, packed with nuts and whole grains. I used all spelt flour and half rolled oats, half steel cut oats. And I’ve been eating them ever since.
I love a good market day
April 11, 2011 § Leave a comment
This weekend I went down the hill to the Alemany Farmers’ market for the first time — ever. It’s odd that, even though we live in such close proximity to it, we always chose the market at the Ferry Building. Perhaps that market has a soft place in my heart after many mornings when I was younger spent at the old Embarcadero parking lot location eating watermelon and root beer flavored honey straws. But these days that location is madly overrun with people, so we went for a quick stop at the Hayes Valley Grill stand for the mandatory crab cake sandwich — char-grilled crusty roll, creamy, toasty fresh crab, with a hearty swipe of herb aioli, mixed lettuce and sliced cabbage, and a couple of tomato slices — and a leisurely stroll through the Alemany market. We found fresh corn tortillas, spicy smoked scallops, vibrant chard in every color of the rainbow and even long stalks of sugar cane, which I had to be convinced out of purchasing before I even knew what to do with sugar cane besides eat it raw. I think I’ll be back just for the smell of corn over the fire.
Following the eating extravaganza, in which I demolished a carton of organic strawberries in a couple of minutes right there in the parking lot, I went for an afternoon run along the Sawyer Camp Trial. The trail starts as a crowded mess of weekend walkers and children biking during the first mile and then the crowds thin out, and you’re practically on your own, winding along the twists and turns of the reservoir, until you finally cross to the other side and start climbing. The trail is marked every half-mile, which makes pacing very easy but also pushes you faster than you should be going. I topped off the last mile really pushing it only to come to the realization as I sat down on the hot pavement to stretch, that the marathon is in less than a week. Cue terrified freak-out.
While we were down on the Peninsula, my mother picked up a bag of lemons from a friend’s backyard tree. A couple of extras were thrown in the paper bag upon the news that I was on a citrus curd-making spree. Following my blood orange tart, which I made a couple of weeks ago (and you can find it at Eat the Love, alongside the other fabulous citrus desserts at 18 Reasons — my skirt matches, don’t you think?), I have started branching out from my favorite lemon and discovering the ups and downs of curd making. I’ve struggled to get a firm consistency from my blood orange curd while maintaining its bright, sing-song color and zesty flavor, and I’ve found that while lime works interchangeably with lemon in my favorite recipe, it’s flavor doesn’t sing “lime.” Rather, the lime curd pops with citrus flavor, but does not meld into a distinct lime burst until after it has sat on the tongue for awhile. Which is okay I guess, when you’re eating it straight off the spoon.
Cornmeal shortbread for windy sea days
April 7, 2011 § 3 Comments
After a couple of months of floating around, sort of doing one thing, starting another, the rest of my life until the start of school in September is all but laid in stone. Plane tickets are bought, apartment secured, various bureaucratic forms being sent in. It’s a little surreal — at the start, the idea of having a whole year seems so long and then I got swept up and suddenly I have it all planned out down to the last day. It seems I have a thousand documents open at once: draft articles for my new column, writing samples for journalism seminars, and finally, I’m pouring through past journals, filled with fiction stories and trying to edit, but failing that because well, they’re not really fiction and I’m not really ready to see an editor.
My spring is filled with half-thoughts, ideas that will be realized simply because I have deadlines that need to be met. Meanwhile San Francisco seems to be similarly indecisive about what time it is. The blazing hot afternoon softly melts into evening at the top of my hill. Dogs that I often trip over dart around the dusty paths and I pass the same people over and over again as I complete the sixth mile repeat. There’s something eerie at the shorelines blurring by as I run, at any second in time a different shore of the bay appears across the crosshatch of streets. As the sky darkens, a couple of lights begin to appear among the houses, outlining the city in gold. And then the wind comes out in full force, bringing runners to a standstill, burning the skin with frosty gusts.
The end-all-be-all in non-poetic language is that I am leaving for Prague in about two months, right after the Taste of Mendocino Public Tasting (follow @tasteofmendo), which I strongly urge you all to attend here in San Francisco. It’ll be packed full of wine tastings, food vendors and haystacks and promises to be a good time. Kind of like a weekend away in the country, just a bit more condensed and uhhh…it doesn’t require you to actually leave for the country.
These cornmeal shortbread are a bit of a rustic take on shortbread. I would recommend using superfine cornmeal, though the recipe doesn’t specify. We loved the grainy texture of the cornmeal but could have done without the couple hard crunches. Finally, the recipe says to pipe the dough into spirals using a pastry tip. My dough came to a thick, normal shortbread consistency, that absolutely would not have supported being piped through anything. So, I used the roll and cut method, which worked just fine.
Cornmeal Cookies
Adapted from Saveur
2 1/4 cups flour
3/4 cup cornmeal
1 cup sugar
1 tsp. finely grated lemon zest
21 tbsp. (1/2 lb. plus 5 tbsp.) butter, softened
2 egg yolks
Combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, and lemon zest in a large bowl. Add butter and egg yolks. Use your fingers to work the butter and egg yolks into the dry mixture until you get an even crumb. Turn the crumbly dough out onto a clean counter and knead into a soft, smooth ball. Place the ball of dough back into the bowl and cover with a clean damp cloth for about an hour.
Preheat oven to 300°. Line cookie sheets with parchment paper. Lightly dust a clean work surface. Roll out to dough to a 1/4-inch thick. Cut out cookies using shapes of your choice and place on parchment paper. Bake cookies for 25-30 minutes or until lightly golden browned. Transfer cookies to racks to cool.
Soufflé Days 